About this Author

College chemistry, 1983

The 2002 Model

After 10 years of blogging. . .

Derek Lowe, an Arkansan by birth, got his BA from Hendrix College and his PhD in organic chemistry from Duke before spending time in Germany on a Humboldt Fellowship on his post-doc. He's worked for several major pharmaceutical companies since 1989 on drug discovery projects against schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, diabetes, osteoporosis and other diseases.
To contact Derek email him directly: derekb.lowe@gmail.com
Twitter: Dereklowe

June 7, 2005

Experimental Update

Posted by Derek

Since I mentioned a while back that I was setting up a crucial run of experiments, I thought I should let the (three or four) people who are following this story know what's going on.

What's going on is that I'm slowly chewing a hole through my desk. The instrument that I need to get these samples analyzed went down just as I was finishing up the experimental run. And that's not "down" as in "let's replace the fitting with a new one from the drawer here," that's "down" as in crucial-hardware-back-ordered-from-another-continent. As in two service techs up to their elbows in the thing for three days - that kind of down. As of today, the machine still isn't its old self.

My original run of experiments is probably untrustworthy at this point - I'm saving it to try out backup analysis techniques. I set up another run of fresh ones, which are now in the freezer, waiting to be analyzed when there's something to analyze them with. I console myself with the thought that they must have some pretty good stuff in them, because the universe is sure doing a good job of keeping me from ever finding out.

beeing one of the four people following this story, I wonder if you can release some more information on what exactly the chemistry is your trying to do, or is it going to be a patent once it works? If its woth a JACS we won´t tell anybody you mentioned details around here ;-)
Hannes

Would that instrument happen to be a mass spec? Just curious, as I ran herd on an old Kratos sector machine about a decade ago, and what you described sounded familier. Great data system, wonderful magnet, British electronics. Sigh....

I became great friends with their service techs, having shared many long nights elbow deep inside power supplies, running out to my car for jumper cables to use as temporary connections to the magnet, great fun.

Yep, sounded like a MS incident to me as well.
Boy, what ever happened to old fashioned TLC with the assorted stains for this and that?
I'm guessing by now, most of those little vials would give you a nice "Shriner's Parade" of spots from top to bottom of your tlc were you to entertain that notion.